There is a hush around the table. Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — breaks the silence.
‘That’s well cool.’
There are murmurs of agreement.
Someone asks Geeta what her object was and someone else says it’s the clock above the fireplace and she nods her agreement at this.
Grace anticipates my asking who wants to read next by raising her arm. The loose sleeve of her hooded top yields to gravity and then it seems as if everyone around the table is staring at the pale flesh of Grace’s inner forearm criss-crossed with red weals. A battle between defiance and embarrassment is fought silently inside that strange, square head. Eventually she lowers her arm and pulls the sleeve back into place. She looks down at the pages on the table in front of her and I am not alone in inspecting the white trails of exposed scalp revealed by her somewhat stringy hair. They remind me of the paths visible in the woodland on the far side of the valley.
Grace starts reading: ‘One occasion the following year, Nicholas and Jonny travelled to Hyde without Liz, who was on call and therefore couldn’t leave London. Nicholas had tried to increase the frequency of their visits. It was important to him to give Jonny a real sense of his adoptive family, a firm grounding in its history.’
Grace glances up and has a quick look around the table before continuing.
As Nicholas and Jonny were arriving, slightly out of breath after the uphill walk from the railway station, a man was just leaving the house. He was short and stocky, thickening around the middle, with dark hair and a silver-white beard. He wore round glasses and a sleeveless, green quilted jacket and carried a bag. He seemed preoccupied and didn’t reply when Nicholas spoke to him. With a distracted air he got into a Renault Espace that was parked outside the house and drove off.
Nicholas rang the bell, but nobody came to the door.
‘Maybe Nana Grandad gone out,’ Jonny said.
‘They don’t go out that much,’ Nicholas said.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose they’re old. It’s difficult. Maybe Grandad’s gone out and Nana’s asleep. Or the other way around.’ Nicholas smiled at Jonny. ‘Let’s go round the back.’
They let themselves in via the kitchen door. The house was quiet. Nicholas could hear a clock ticking in another room. The kitchen smelt as it always did, of lemon curd and Bovril and potted meat and vegetables that were just beginning to turn. He opened a cupboard and found a bottle of orange squash so he could make Jonny a drink. The boy sat at the kitchen table while Nicholas went into the front room, but there was no sign of his grandad, who had perhaps nipped out for supplies, knowing that Nicholas and Jonny were due. There was a line of cards on the mantelpiece. Two weeks previously it had been his nana’s birthday. He picked each card up in turn and read inside. Seeing his own handwriting made him feel self-conscious. He briefly wondered how old she was and worked out that she was eighty-six. He read his grandad’s card, which said ‘To my darling wife, with my love.’ Nicholas swallowed as he stood the card back on the mantelpiece.
He returned to the kitchen, but the plastic cup sat unaccompanied on the table. From upstairs he heard a voice.
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes?’
He started walking into the hall and towards the foot of the stairs.
‘Nana’s asleep.’
‘Well, don’t wake her,’ he said in a loud whisper as he climbed the stairs.
‘She’s sleeping with her mouth open.’ Jonny’s voice grew slightly shrill. ‘She won’t wake up.’
Nicholas climbed the stairs and entered Nana’s bedroom to find Jonny holding her by the shoulder and shaking her. He grabbed Jonny’s arm and pulled him back, roughly, too roughly. The boy started crying. Nana lay on her back, her bottom jaw hanging open. She looked small, doll-like. Jonny was still crying. Nicholas reached out and gathered him into a fierce embrace.
‘I’m sorry, Jonny. I’m sorry.’
They waited downstairs and Nicholas didn’t call anyone. He found something for Jonny to play with while he listened for the sound of the front gate. Instead, what he heard was the scrunch of tyres on gravel. He went to the door to see his grandad climbing effortfully out of the car.
‘I went to fetch you,’ Grandad said.
‘I’m sorry, Grandad. You must have just missed us. We walked. Grandad?’
Grandad stopped and looked at Nicholas.
‘Come inside.’
‘What is it? What have you got to tell me?’
Nicholas took his grandad into the front room and told him what they had found. The old man’s face crumpled, his features disappearing, and Nicholas saw tears sprouting from rhinoceros-like folds of skin. He placed an awkward hand on his grandad’s shoulder.
‘We need to call someone,’ Nicholas said. ‘I don’t know who to call.’ And as he said this he remembered the man they had seen leaving the house.
‘We need to call the GP, Dr Shipman,’ Grandad said.
‘If you give me his number I’ll call him.’
Within twenty minutes, a car could be heard pulling up outside the house. Nicholas looked out of the window. The same man was walking up the garden path as they had seen leaving the house on their arrival. Nicholas went to open the door. The man looked surprised to see him, but merely muttered something unintelligible and insinuated his bag into the space between Nicholas and the door jamb in order to gain entry. Nicholas watched the doctor’s back as he walked upstairs, then went into the front room to wait with Grandad.
Eventually, they heard the doctor making his way downstairs. Nicholas went to open the door and the doctor entered the front room. Grandad tried to stand, but Nicholas went over to him and encouraged him to stay seated.
‘She was all right when I left her earlier,’ the doctor said, as if it were merely annoying that the timing was awry.
Grandad frowned.
‘The doctor was here earlier,’ Nicholas explained. ‘He was just leaving when we arrived.’
‘Her heart gave out,’ the doctor said, scratching his chin through his scruff of white beard.
‘Her heart gave out? She was fine. She was perfectly fit and well,’ Grandad said.
‘How can her heart just give out?’ Nicholas asked.
‘She was eighty-odd.’
‘Eighty-six. Just,’ Nicholas said, profoundly irritated by the doctor’s manner.
‘We all have to go sometime,’ he said.
‘What?’ Nicholas shouted. ‘Is that the best you can do? We all have to go sometime?’
The doctor’s face twisted into a self-pitying grimace.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he muttered.
He turned to go but the doorway was blocked. Jonny was standing there.
Jonny said: ‘When’s Nana going to wake up? Daddy? Daddy? Why won’t Nana wake up?’
There is silence when Grace finishes. She keeps her head down, so it isn’t immediately clear that she has indeed finished. Also, because she read for so long, much longer than one would normally read during such an exercise, many of those around the table got so used to the sound of her deep, cracked voice, even became mesmerised by it, that they were no longer waiting for it to stop.
But then someone claps and another person follows and soon the whole room is applauding. Finally she looks up — at me. I look away and smile at those faces around the table that are turning towards mine. Slowly the clapping dies down.